by Lily Tuck
What everyone else remembers about Peru is why we went there in the first place.
My mother and I went to Lima, Peru, to wait until the end of the war. From Europe, it was a long way to go to just wait. A journey of several weeks—first by car, then by boat, then by plane. By the end of it, I was tired, I was sick, I pushed away my mother’s hand and did not listen to her when, in between gasps into her oxygen mask, she said: “If you don’t breathe into your mask, you’ll faint.” She held up mine to my mouth, but a few minutes earlier I had thrown up. I was afraid I would do it again. I held my breath for as long as I could and until I had to exhale. When I went to breathe again, nothing happened.
One of the stewards had to revive me. He gave me mouth-to-mouth on the aisle floor while the other passengers stared and my mother cried.
Afterward, when the plane was flying at a lower altitude, the pilot walked up to my mother.
“Is the little girl okay?”
“Yes, she’s fine now. She frightened me,” my mother answered him.
“Where are you folks from?”
My mother told him.
“You’re getting off in Lima?”
My mother nodded. In her relief, she told him where.
“How long will you be staying?” Before my mother could answer, he must have remembered the war. “It’ll be over soon,” he said. “Is this your first trip to Peru?”
I was wondering who was flying the plane. The pilot belonged back in the cockpit. He had perched himself on my mother’s armrest, he was talking to her as if he had all day. He took out a pad, he wrote addresses down. I squirmed in my seat. When at last he got up to leave, he patted my mother on the arm, he winked at me.
“I’ll be seeing you,” he told both of us, “and don’t frighten your mother again.”
“See,” my mother said, her face was flushed, she looked pretty. “Next time we fly, you’ll wear your oxygen mask.”
The American pilot was wrong—the war was not over soon. In Lima, my mother rented a small house. The house was one story and shaped like the letter U. In the middle there was a courtyard with banana trees. I was very excited about the banana trees—I could pick and eat as many bananas as I liked. If she was in a good mood, I could convince the cook to fry them for me. I ate bananas until I got sick from them and left them to rot and attract flies.
Beyond the courtyard there was a garden of sorts, but the maid, Margarita, said the garden was full of snakes and my mother said that I should not believe everything Margarita said, but that we also could not afford both a cook and a gardener—to say nothing of Margarita. Instead, my mother planted red geraniums in pots, the rest she left wild. It was too hot, she said, and who knew how long we would stay. Any day now, we might leave, leave Lima and go back.
Back to where?
My father was from Berlin, and long before I learned that his house, the entire street on which he and my mother had lived, was rubble, I knew we would not go back there. Also, I knew we would not stay in Lima. Lima was temporary. Lima was in between two places, one I could not remember, the other I could not imagine. Lima was limbo.
The pilot’s name was Jerry. When he was not flying his plane, he was flying through the air into the Lima Country Club pool. He did jackknives. The Peruvian waiters, trays in hand, would stop to watch him. He was not showing off. Once, I heard Jerry ask my mother if she wanted to fly with him. She could sit in the cockpit. After glancing over in my direction, my mother shook her head. Then, adjusting the straps to her two-piece bathing suit, she stood up and dove into the pool. Her bathing suit was red and white stripes. “Miss America!” Jerry called out after her. At the last minute, just before hitting the water, my mother’s pointed feet crossed—like Jesus’s on the cross.
I knew what they looked like.
Every day on my way home from school, I went to mass with the maid and I prayed to Him. I am not sure what I prayed for: maybe, that the war would end, that I could dive like Jerry, or own a bathing suit like my mother’s. I remember that if I made a mistake in the wording or in the order of prayer, I started all over again. Also, I crossed myself all the time. It was more than a habit, it was a tic. I crossed myself when I crossed the street, when someone dropped a dish, when a dog barked, so much so that my mother asked me to stop. “It’s meaningless,” she told me. “You’re not a Catholic.” Since she did not say what I was, I continued to cross myself behind her back.
I wanted to outdo the maid.
Side by side, on our knees, it was like an endurance test: who could pray the longest, the hardest, without once looking up or at each other. Not much taller than I, Margarita had a flat Inca face and the heels of her feet were so dark and callused, I guessed she had more to pray for than I did. In church I copied her, at home I bullied her. Later, when she discovered the marble Jesus in my room, I bit her. My mother sided with Margarita. I had drawn blood and her hand became infected. “Why did you do it?” my mother asked me. I would not answer her. She asked me in Spanish: “¿Porqué la mordio?” I shook my head, I felt like crying. “You must apologize to Margarita.” I refused. Margarita, red-eyed, and with an elaborate bandage on her hand, avoided me. I heard her tell the cook in the kitchen that I was just like a dog. The cook laughed.
We rarely mentioned my father. I waited for my mother to bring up his name. He was more hers than mine. Whenever she received a letter from him, she read the letter in her room, the door shut. I dreaded those letters. The letters were written in French (although German, my father had enlisted as a French soldier, a legionnaire, and under the circumstances, it would have been inadmissable for him to write my mother in his native tongue). My father’s French was scanty, I pictured him with a dictionary in one hand, a pen in the other, and how did he sign the letters? Je t’aime or Je t’embrasse—endearments so unfamiliar as to be meaningless. Jerry must have been a relief. He talked to my mother about golf scores, canasta scores, not scores of dead.
My mother was twenty-eight, I was seven. At the time, I had no idea she was so young.
Jerry was older. Thirty-five, forty? His children, a boy and a girl, were teenagers, and at the pool, I watched them. Judy wore lipstick and painted her toe nails red. Both she and her brother, Jerry Junior, had adopted the arrogance and petulance of expatriate children. They read the local funny papers and ordered Cokes in a fluent colloquial Spanish that proclaimed their intimacy with the country, but not their attachment to it. A few feet away, their mother sat in the shade of an umbrella. She was either allergic to the sun or bored by it. When Jerry did his splendid jackknives not one of them looked up.
“Come on, Jerry, I’ll race you,” he called to his son from the water.
“Nah. Too hot. I’m tired.”
I looked at my mother. She was reading a book, or pretending to read.
I will! I wished I could answer Jerry. I wanted to know what it was like to be with him.
When he sat drying himself in the sun, not looking at my mother or at anyone, I wanted to reach out and touch the blond hairs on his legs. My father always wore suits.
“I’m worried about her,” I overheard my mother say. “She spends all her time indoors, in church, with the maid.”
“Make her take swimming lessons.”
It was a Saturday afternoon, my mother was playing canasta at the club with Jerry, his wife, and someone else.
“Can I shuffle the cards?” The hottest and stillest part of the day, I prowled aimlessly stirring up the warm air and American cigarette smoke.
“Can I cut the deck?” I liked to do that, which exasperated my mother.
“Okay. Just once.” She frowned while the others fell silent.
My hands were sticky, I spilled some of the cards on the floor. Crossing myself, I bent down to pick them up.
Next to Margarita’s and my church, there was a store that sold religious artifacts. Margarita was friendly with the salesgirl, and often after school, we went in there. While they were busy talking, I brows
ed in the store, I inspected the statues up close. I compared them. I chose which Virgin Mary was the prettiest, the kindest looking, had the nicest clothes. If I was careful, I could touch and no one said not to. I don’t know when exactly I first noticed the baby Jesus. His flesh was Carrara-marble pink, His loincloth and eyes were painted the same aquamarine blue. He was beautiful. Precious too, He was lying inside a glass case on a piece of velvet. I wanted Him right away, but each time I approached the case with Him in it, the salesgirl broke off her conversation with Margarita. She told me not to touch the glass, my hands were dirty. Before I did, she must have known what I was going to do.
I could take the money from my mother’s purse, but the salesgirl would ask where I got the money and tell Margarita who knew I had no money. I could save someone’s life, another child’s, at the risk of my own, and claim the statue as a reward. My prayers grew longer. I vowed never to ask for anything again. Obsessed, I readied my room for the baby Jesus. I concocted a shrine for him—a tiny bed of cotton wool. I festooned it with beads, I lopped off the heads of my mother’s geraniums.
In a few months, I had learned how to swim well enough to start to dive. Jerry took an interest in me.
“Put your chin on your chest,” he advised. “Don’t look up or you’ll do a belly flop.” Sometimes, he would put his hand on my stomach to steady me at the pool’s edge, then, gently, push me in. It was the only time Judy or Jerry Junior looked up.
Smack! I belly-flopped.
Jerry laughed, shook his crew-cut head. “Almost. Didn’t I tell you to keep your chin down?”
I tried again. I was indefatigable. It did not matter that I was too little, skinny, and that I could not dive. Jerry’s attention was like a blessing, his hand on my stomach bestowed more than equality. Over and over, I belly-flopped happily into the Lima pool.
One day, Jerry produced a dollar bill. I had never seen one before. “It’s worth a lot of soles,” he told me. “See if you can keep it under your chin.” The dollar bill floated up in the water, but it gave me an idea. I would ask Jerry to buy the baby Jesus. I would tell him that it was a present for my mother—she had admired Him in the store.
I waited for him outside the men’s locker room while he changed into his golf clothes. The first time, Jerry came out with his foursome. The men were carrying heavy bags of clubs and laughing. Jerry did not see me. The second time, the men’s locker room attendant came out before Jerry did and asked me in Spanish what I was doing there. When I shrugged my shoulders and did not answer, he said a bad word. I was tempted to wait for Jerry in the middle of the fairway, but I did not dare. Children were forbidden there.
I was almost ready to give up when the cook rushed me through breakfast one morning.
“Your mother is giving a party,” Margarita explained. “She has a lot of cooking to do.”
I thought the party was for my father. The war was over and he was coming to Lima.
“If people ask you over to their houses, you have to pay them back,” my mother explained. We were in the courtyard where the guests would sit before dinner, she was tidying up. “Wear your yellow dress tonight. What’s happened to all the geraniums? There aren’t any flowers.”
My mother had lit candles in the courtyard and geraniums or no, it looked festive. She looked beautiful in a white dress that I had never seen before. Her long blond hair was swept up from her face and held up by a sparkling comb. To me, the stones in the comb looked like diamonds. From time to time, she touched them. Her arms were bare and brown.
“You know Ellie.” My mother smiled and prodded the stiff yellow cotton on my back.
I was looking for Jerry. More familiar to me by the pool or playing cards, in our house, my mother’s guests looked like strangers.
“How’s the future champion diver?” Dressed in a dark suit, Jerry looked formal, forbidding. I almost did not recognize him.
The dining room was directly across from my bedroom and Margarita was serving. She was frightened of making a mistake and angering either my mother or the cook. The cook had taken a lot of trouble, for days she would complain about it. Kneeling in front of my shrine, I could hear the clinking of china and glasses, the voices and laughter of the guests. I prayed for Jerry to come out of the dining room by himself.
I must have shut my eyes, I must have fallen asleep where I was. When I opened my eyes again, I heard someone crying. My mother was standing alone in the courtyard, her back to me. Her shoulders were shaking, her hair had come undone. It was late. All the candles in the courtyard had burned out, the guests had gone home, the cook and Margarita were already in bed.
The next day, my mother searched for her diamond comb. I was determined to find it for her. On my hands and knees, I looked in the courtyard. Still on my hands and knees, I went to look for the comb in the wild part of the garden where the snakes were. This was where I found the dog turd. I picked it up to show Margarita. A sausage, I said. A neighbor’s dog, a dirty dog! I was wicked to touch it! Margarita, beside herself, had screamed at me, and God would punish me.
The View from Madama Butterfly’s House
Except for the nun, we are the only ones. The nun wears a retainer—the kind that is made of wire that comes out of the mouth and that goes from one side of the face to the other. Everyone else at the Nagasaki Museum is, of course, Japanese.
The nun is also wearing a short habit—well, if the a little below the knee length navy blue dress she is wearing with a white bib attached to the collar is still called a habit. A small gold crucifix dangles from the chain she wears around her neck and her head is half covered with a short matching blue wimple with white trim.
We can see that she has not cut off her hair—brown, light, curly hair.
A group of schoolchildren wearing dark blue uniforms is in the museum with us. A visit to the Nagasaki Museum, we have been told, is compulsory for them—the schoolchildren come from all over Kyushu island, from Fukuoka, from as far away as Miyazaki. Afterward, the children are allowed to play for half an hour in the neighboring Peace Park.
In addition to the schoolchildren, a young couple holding hands—perhaps they are here on their honeymoon—is visiting the Nagasaki Museum. The young man and young woman are brightly dressed in the latest fashion and each wears the same kind of expensive running shoe.
The Nagasaki Museum is not as big as the museum in Hiroshima, nor is it as modern. The Nagasaki Museum is four stories high. Each floor contains a different sort of exhibit. The exhibits are lined up in a row on the walls behind glass, the captions underneath them are written in Japanese and in English. The Nagasaki Museum is built on the exact epicenter. Before the museum, there was a prison.
There are two sets of stairs in the Nagasaki Museum—one to be used for going up, the other for going down. As we climb the stairs to go to the second floor, we pass three old people we have not seen before. The old people climb the stairs single file. They are holding on to the railing with both hands as if they were hauling themselves up out of a deep dark well with a rope.
The old people are no taller than the schoolchildren.
“How old would you say?” we whisper.
“Sixty-five. Seventy, at least.”
“In 1945, they would have been young,” we calculate.
A few of the schoolchildren are already on their way down. We guess from the way they push and rush each other that they are anxious to go out and play in the Peace Park. From across the other set of stairs, some of the children stare over at us.
Unlike the schoolchildren, the old people do not even look.
“Terrible,” we say.
“Hard to believe,” we say.
“Never in our whole life have we seen anything like this here,” we say.
“To think, one minute they were on their way to work, on their way to school, about to catch the bus,” we say.
“Children, too,” we say.
“Madness,” we say.
“And it could happen
again.”
The nun wearing the retainer is on the second floor looking at the same exhibit. Sometimes, she walks ahead of us and we can see her peer closely at an object, sometimes, the nun falls back behind us. Twice, we nearly bump into her.
“Excuse us.”
We try hard not to stare at her—at her retainer.
The restrooms at the Nagasaki Museum are located on either side of the stairs on the second floor. The women’s restroom of the Nagasaki Museum has two toilets—a Japanese-style toilet and a Western-style toilet.
While we are washing our hands, the nun wearing the retainer comes in. In her hurry, she uses the Japanese-style toilet.
“Ah, thank God,” she says. On account of the retainer that she wears, the nun speaks with a slight lisp.
On the third floor of the Nagasaki Museum, the young couple who may be on their honeymoon steps quickly apart.
“They weren’t even born then,” we say.
The young couple is standing in front of a large wall clock that has stopped. The caption underneath it says how the clock face is miraculously undamaged, the glass did not break. The needles of the clock will always point to the same numbers, the second hand, too, has stopped forever between the seven and the eight.
The nun with the retainer says something to the young Japanese couple; the couple, in turn, smile and bow to her.
“Oh,” we say afterward. “You speak Japanese.”
The nun says, “I thaid how I was thorry. I apolozithed to them.”
The nun tells us that it will be two years exactly next month that she has been in Japan, but that this is her first trip to Nagasaki, her first trip to Kyushu island.
“Our first trip, too,” we say.
The nun says how, next, we must be sure to visit Madama Butterfly’s house. The view from Madama Butterfly’s house is of all Nagasaki and there is nothing quite like it, she says.
“We love it. The Japanese people. The food,” we add.
The nun smiles and, for the first time, we get to see her teeth. To us, her teeth do not look so bad. Her teeth look like ordinary teeth, like normal teeth, like our teeth.
